Bernie Sanders Supported Socialist Sandinistas, Honeymooned in USSR

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote a political memoir in 1997, one “published by the radical left-wing Verso Books,” according to MSNBC.

Co-written with University of Vermont English professor Huck Gutman, who would later go on to serve as Sanders’ Senate chief of staff, “Outside in the House” is centered around the democratic socialist’s 1996 congressional reelection campaign against Susan Sweetser, a top-tier Republican recruit whose red-baiting TV ads backfired.

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Perhaps most noteworthy, Sanders supported “the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua” at the same time it was fighting “a proxy war” with America during the Reagan years.

In 1985, he became the highest-ranking American official to visit Nicaragua at the time, and met with President Daniel Ortega. In his book, he called the trip “profoundly emotional” and praised Ortega. Burlington [where Sanders was mayor] and Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, became sister cities.

Sanders also enjoyed a “romantic honeymoon” in the USSR with his wife, Jane, when they married in 1988. The trip was “to Yaroslavl, in the then-Soviet Union. The trip was an official delegation from Burlington to cement the two cities’ sister-city relationship.”

“Trust me. It was a very strange honeymoon,” Sanders writes.

Sanders also visited Cuba with his wife in 1989 and hoped to meet with Fidel Castro, but it didn’t work out. Instead, Sanders met with Havana’s mayor and other unnamed officials.